Issued from the manufacturing floor at 362 Fifth Avenue
The Aeolian Music Roll Catalogue
Spring Quarterly · Number XXXVII · Anno MCMXIII
PUBLISHED BY THE AEOLIAN MUSIC ROLL PUBLISHING COMPANY · NEW YORK · LONDON · STUTTGART
This Spring's pressing has been our most ambitious to date. Across these pages you will find sixteen new rolls cut from sessions held this winter past, each one carrying the actual touch, pacing, and dynamic phrasing of a working concert pianist into your parlor by way of perforated paper, polished brass, and the patient mechanical apparatus of the home pianoforte. We do not exaggerate when we say that the family at the kitchen table in Marquette, Michigan now hears the same Tchaikovsky as the patron in the Carnegie box seat, performed by the same hands, with the same rubato, on the same week.
Every roll listed herein is cut at our facility on calibrated Welte presses or our own Ampico Reproducing machinery, with tracking precision verified to within four thousandths of an inch across the full eighty-eight-note span. Specifications are listed alongside each entry — please consult them carefully against your home instrument's compatibility schedule. Our compatibility correspondents in the back office will answer any question by return post.
— The Editor, Catalogue Department
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By Genre
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Customer & Pianist Submission Desk
If you have recorded a roll under our Ampico session program, or wish to log a parlor account of a roll you have purchased, fill the form below. New listings appear immediately in the catalogue above and are retained for the editor's review at the close of each quarter.
From the Founder's Desk · A Companion Sheet
The Aeolian Pianola & Roll Library
A complete catalogue of reproducing instruments & perforated music rolls · Spring, 1913
Sold on terms of $25 down and $15 monthly, twelve to twenty-four months. Free demonstration in any city served by our 47 retail establishments.
Compatibility Index: Ampico rolls reproduce all dynamic expression coded in the perforation pattern. Welte-Mignon rolls operate with the patent pneumatic-secondary apparatus. Standard 88-note rolls play with parlor-operator tempo control on any Pianola instrument.
"I shall never forget the evening the Brahms came through the spool-box for the first time. The children stopped moving entirely." — Mrs. C. Hartwell, Buffalo
To every family receiving this catalogue —
I write tonight from the cutting floor, where the perforation presses are still running, even at this late hour. We are well into the Spring run, and as I walk between the tables I find myself, again, thinking about what we are doing here.
For four hundred years a man could not hear a great pianist play unless he traveled to the city where that pianist played, on the night that pianist played there. The recital was the only door; if you lived beyond it, you lived without. A child born brilliant in music in Marquette, Michigan could pass an entire life and never once hear Mr. Hofmann play Chopin, never once hear a Liszt transcription performed by a hand that understood it. That is not a small thing. I do not believe it ever was.
What we are making on this floor is the answer to that. Every roll that leaves here carries a real performance — the actual touch, the actual pedaling, the actual breath between phrases — across distance and weather and bank-account, into a parlor in Marquette, in Tucson, in the prairie towns where no piano teacher has ever lived and no concert tour has ever stopped. We are not making toys. We are not making facsimiles or souvenirs. We are making access. It is the closest thing this century has yet produced to a door opened all the way.
I do not believe the work is finished. There are pianists yet unrecorded; there are families yet without instruments; there are mountain circuits and river towns where our distribution boxes do not yet reach. But I believe — with my entire chest — that this is the year. This is the year in which the great performance ceased to be the property of the few. I shall not see the end of it. I only wish to help with as much of the beginning as I am able.
With sincere thanks for your custom, your faith, and your parlors,
— Edmund H. Aeolian-Sebright Founder & President The Aeolian Music Roll Publishing Company Manhattan · this 14th day of April, MCMXIII